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HYSTERIA

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This series uses hysteria to explore relationships between women’s illness, disability, and creativity. Used for centuries, "hysteria" offered a catch-all “diagnosis” to explain such symptoms as fainting, indigestion, insomnia, heart palpitations, headaches, fidgetiness, depression, mental confusion, and fatigue. The diagnosis let doctors (male) explain/ignore what they could not understand about women’s bodies and minds. Many of the best-known women writers and thinkers of the turn-of-the-century—including Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—were diagnosed with hysteria at some point. Today, women’s bodies are still inadequately understood by modern medicine, with drugs too often only tested on men, women’s symptoms taken less seriously, and gendered differences in the appearance of many diseases leading to misdiagnosis in women. The series begins with Hysteria 1: The Yellow Wallpaper (left), a reinterpretation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of the same name centered on a hysteric being “treated” with bed rest, which forebade any reading, writing or handwork, instead requiring constant rest. The story’s main character is convinced that the ugly yellow wallpaper is driving her mad, while the reader understands that bed rest itself is the culprit. My series also (so far) includes pieces based on Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” (Hysteria 2: Deserters from the Army of the Upright; see below), Georgia O’Keeffe’s southwestern landscapes (Hysteria 3: O’Keeffe’s Medicine; in progress), and Frida Kahlo’s disabling bus accident (Hysteria 4: Frida’s Wreck; in progress).

Hysteria 2: Deserters from the Army of the Upright.

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